VisualSeed

Now "Estimates" are making their own claims...

studiomusic said:

sog35 said:

Based on sales/profits?  Sales/profits are SHARPLY down this quarter. And will sharply down AGAIN next quarter.

You should look for more of a trend over a few years.
iPhone 6 plus was an anomaly. 3 years of pent up demand. Nobody could have bested that.
Compared to 2014 profit and sales are much higher.

-isn't that what you were saying yesterday?

It's like having a burger joint that averages about $5K a day in sales. Then out of the blue one day, 8 tour buses stop and they do $9K is sales. The next day nothing out of the ordinary happens but they do $7K and the manager complains because sales were down $2K and swears the place is going out of business. 

kermit4krazy said:

SpamSandwich said:

Hmm... this could be the news behind the news. Surely Icahn leaked this beforehand and it multiplied the selloff in AAPL. He can't keep his mouth shut when it comes to his own stock manipulation tactics.

If Apple continues the buyback, they should be buying it all back now when it's undervalued.

Yeah, god forbid they spend that money on, you know, developing a revolutionary new battery technology or on figuring out a way to fit two ports on the new Macbook. 

They could employee every expert and researcher in the world on battery technology and not spend money faster than they are making it. Spending money is not their problem. Talent is so hard to find they are having to painstakingly recruit it from other companies. 

He was never in it as a pure stock investment. He wanted to manipulate a quick return by forcing the company to do unusual things that only those with sizable holding would benefit from. More importantly he had his eyes on the big pile of cash Apple had and was trying everything he could to get them to give it all to the investors. When Apple financed their stock buybacks because it was cheaper than spending cash it pretty much killed his ambitions. 
In the future, if there is ever a shareholder push to remove Cook, it will have nothing to do with the direction Apple is going with its products or as a company. It will be solely to try to install a CEO that will raid the company's cash and spend it on the shareholders and pointless acquisitions from close associates. 

sog35 said:

VisualSeed said:

I'd argue that while phones are selling it is best to maximize profits and invest in services that will be profitable when phone become low cost commodities.

At first desktops commanded high prices. Then they got commoditized.
But near the same time laptops popped up, they commanded high prices.
More recently laptops have become commoditized but smartphones command high prices.
So when smartphones are commoditized there will be ANOTHER form factor that will command high prices.

My point is form factors get commoditized but not computing devices.
There will always be computing devices that command high prices.

Besides iMac and Macbooks have not been commoditized. They still command premium prices. I don't see why iPhone/iPad won't continue to command high prices for the next 5 years.

Apple products will most certainly always be premium priced. The debut of the iPad Pro at a premium point price tells me they are going to maximize profits by catering to a premium market that may result in fewer units sold but will still probably take the majority of the profits from the tablet market. But the problem with selling less units (even at higher prices) is that margins shrink as volume component pricing can't be maintained. The same could conceivably happen to the phone, though it would take many many years of decreased sales for that to happen. But extremely high volume sales also has its own problems. One of my suspicions is that Apple keeps changing the materials the phones bodies are made of is because they buy in such high volumes they constrain the supply of those materials as the rest of the industry demands them as well and prices increase thereby decreasing their margins. It is also conceivable that future phones (or any devices for that matter) may require features demanded by the market that are more expensive to implement and also cut into the margins. Decreased margins on hardware sales is most easily compensated for by increasing service revenue.